Lucy Zhang

Maillard Reaction

The skin sticks to the pan if you’re impatient, unwilling to see the carbonyl and amino groups’ reaction through, browned and crisped crust forming a clean divide with the iron, but that sort of time, who has it, balancing between too short and too long, too low and too high, barely skirting carcinogens. We learned to avoid hurtful things young: stray far from intersections without streetlights, refuse every man’s reach because there’s always one hand that’ll choke your words from your trachea and seal your eyelids shut until you can only listen to the slurping of premonitions, made real. The butterfly flew too close to the fire, left us with smoke and charred chitin to drown out the stench of human feces in those hole-in-the-ground toilets; wings that smelled like incense, we’d say. We learned to steam in layered trays, avoiding the oil and sizzle, preserving vibrant hues, almost pastel-like, baby-like. In a sear, the burning comes too late, the scent an aftermath of deprotonated amino acids deglazed with sake or Pinot Noir, the taste of acid and coal and glutamates, darkened to something like death. We scrape and scrape the bottom of the pan, trying to salvage what we lost.

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Lucy Zhang writes, codes and watches anime. Her work has appeared in The Boiler, The Hunger, Fractured Lit and elsewhere. She is a finalist in Best of the Net 2020 and included in Best Microfiction 2021. She edits for Barren Magazine, Heavy Feather Review and Pithead Chapel. Find her at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.